View down Toronto's Eaton Centre mall on March 13, 1980.JACK DOBSON/The Globe and Mail
Pasha Malla’s latest book is Kill the Mall, a novel.
According to various unverifiable claims online, London, Ont., has “more shopping per capita than anywhere else in North America.” I don’t know what that means (like, stores-per-capita or goods-per-person?), or what constitutes “shopping” (do pepperettes count?), but this reputation, valid or not, precedes the internet by several decades.
As a child growing up in London in the 1980s and 90s, I was indoctrinated to believe that my hometown had not just more shopping, but more shopping malls than anywhere in North America – ergo the world. To a 12-year-old boy who didn’t play hockey, our self-proclaimed mall supremacy made London the capital of the universe, and the city’s malls were to me what rinks and arenas were to other kids my age – that is, a place to become myself.
I mean, kind of: Your mom also dragged you to the mall to try on shirts. Although, even then, I relished the opportunity to wander around on my own. To me the mall was never about shopping: it was about independence, and freedom, and braving that elemental childhood terror of getting lost. My affection for the mall had more to do with aesthetics and discovery than commerce. I appreciated its generic, almost vacuous blandness and sterility, which created a kind of blank canvas for self-invention. I could roam without aim or purpose. I could try on clothes. I could try on other people to be.
To this day, I love going to the mall. I feel at home in any mall, from the subterranean bedlam of the Eaton Centre, to the uncanny shopping oases blooming out of the desert of Gurgaon, India, to Syracuse, N.Y.’s Carousel Center (rebranded in 2012, gloriously, as Destiny USA), and all the malls – massive and cramped, luminous and heartbreaking – in between.
As a kid, my favourite mall was London’s CF Masonville Place, an especially perilous spot for adolescents, as a local gang called DOA (hilariously: Dissed On Arrival) would tax kids’ Starter ballcaps at the doorways and – as an intrepid journalist from the London Free Press put it at the time – “display them on their belts like prized trophies.” But even the threat of gang violence couldn’t prevent me from venturing along those wide and airy halls, occasionally dipping into Sunrise Records or Le Château or Champs Sports, or the collegiate-themed shop that sold the preppy campus-wear (desert boots, khakis, Polo shirts) that comprised my sartorial style at the time, and which made me look like a 5-foot-2 Republican class president with Frida Kahlo’s mustache. Masonville had a minigolf course, and a gurgling fountain into which my little sister hurled pennies and wished she were Christian, and a barber shop where I got my hair cut by a guy named Ramon who screamed things like “va-va-voom!” as he gelled my flat-top into a crisp, perfect cube.
But that was two bus rides away. Walking distance to my house was Sherwood Forest Mall, a single-storey, brownly tiled gantlet of businesses useless even for browsing, e.g. a Dominion (then an A&P, now a Price Chopper), a Bank of Montreal, a Beer Store and a tangentially nautical pub called Ye Olde Buccaneer, into which I poked my head once, expecting it to be like Cheers; it was not. Sherwood was, and remains, the sort of mall that exudes a dire and faintly tragic sense of imminent collapse. As a kid, I didn’t go to the mall to feel sad – though now I love these places for their pathos, for how they cling like barnacles to the rusting freighter of consumerism.
Back in the previous century, London had a lot of malls like Sherwood, and remarkably still does, in this era of dead and dying malls. I think only the downtown London Mews (briefly and dubiously marketed as “Smuggler’s Alley”) has fully vanished. I worked in the Mews, actually, at the concession stand of its Famous Players movie theatre, which even then had a whiff of doom about it, particularly when I was tasked with sifting rat turds out of the popcorn kernels.
Anyway, the Mews is gone, but the adjacent, corporately branded Citi Plaza (formerly “the Galleria”), while mostly a dispiriting marketplace of H.R. Giger models and anime-themed cellphone cases, seems to be hanging in.
As is Westmount Mall – perhaps owing to the Asian supermarket that occupies the airplane hangar-sized space where Eaton’s, and then Sears, used to be. In the city’s southeastern corner, White Oaks Mall is not only still open for business, it underwent a recent, ambitious renovation. Also still around are the perfunctorily named London Mall, as well as Cherryhill Mall and Oakridge Mall and Argyle Mall, about which I can only say: congratulations!
I don’t think this is meant to be a transactional piece of writing, where you come away having “gained something.” If you were looking for some cold, hard facts about malls you’ve probably come to the wrong place. What I’ve tried to capture here is something meandering and nostalgic; maybe I’ve been seeking something, too, though not too hard, and not too deep. So what’s my point? My point is that among many things that I’ve come to miss over the past year or so – such as friends and sports and handshakes – I also miss the mall.
Yes, sure, the mall and its decline are a grotesque symbol of the failures of late capitalism, as well as yet another depressing symptom of the destabilization of physical space. But what all of the apocalyptic obituaries about bricks-and-mortar shopping seem to miss is that the supposed “death of the mall” only laments its lapsed dominance of retail commerce. For me, the ability to buy things has always been secondary to enjoying the mall as public space: somewhere free to go, indoors, where anyone can just be, for a while, provided the folks on security detail aren’t too bored, existentially unfulfilled or, you know, hateful and/or racist.
Anyway, I really do miss going to the mall. I miss the weird, flat light, and the arcane shops whose survival seems not just baffling but defiant, and the smell (chlorine and denim), and that constant, low-level buzz of subdued chatter. I miss the food court, with its popcorn and muffin restaurants that exist nowhere else in the world. I miss witnessing the small but fervent dramas between competing shoppers or flirting co-workers. I miss the thrilling surge of stepping off an escalator onto steady ground. I miss being asked, hopefully, “Can I help you?” and responding with a grateful but apologetic smile: “Just looking, thanks.”
Most of all, I miss taking up residence on a bench amid some bustling thoroughfare – at Christmas, ideally – with an Orange Julius in hand, sometimes sipping that perversely delicious cocktail of milk and orange juice, but mostly just letting it slowly melt, thinking about nothing, being nothing, in a place that is nothing, and watching the world go murmuring by.